


The Anathema Files

by seekwill



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale's Bookshop (Good Omens), F/M, Lower Tadfield (Good Omens), M/M, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Rating May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-19 14:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20658563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekwill/pseuds/seekwill
Summary: What does it mean when you stop being the only thing that defined who you were? After burning the second volume ofThe Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, witchfollowing the Apocalypse that wasn't, Anathema Device finds herself unmoored. Her entire life up until this moment had been at the mercy of her ancestor, and for the first time she's in the driver's seat (but with no idea of where she wants to go).A series of ostensibly connected short scenes, following Anathema as she sets out to discover who she is without the Prophecies to guide her.





	1. Anniversary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Rating:** G  
**Chapter Summary:** Anathema puts her foot firmly in her mouth by making assumptions about her new friends.

“Oh, my dear girl. Are you leaving?”**  
**

Anathema looked up from buttoning her coat. Aziraphale had emerged from the back room of his shop, novelty mug featuring angel’s wings grasped in his hands (the mug was a little heavy-handed if you asked her, but no one had). She had come into town earlier in the day to look at Aziraphale’s books of prophecy. She didn’t have her own anymore, and in the months that followed the almost-end-of-the-world, she had found herself at a bit of a loss. She had always been, primarily, a descendant. Who was she now without that? She didn’t know if she was ready to figure it out quite yet.

“Just heading back to the train. Newt wants me back to celebrate our three month anniversary.” Anathema rolled her eyes fondly. In spite of herself, she was actually quite charmed by his insistence. (_“It’s just three months.” “Yeah but it’s three months_ with you_.”_) 

“Well, isn’t that sweet.”

As she freed her hair from her coat collar, she saw Crowley come to stand behind Aziraphale. She hadn’t even realized he was here. His hair was mussed on one side, as if he had been laying down, sleeping. “So, do you two have an anniversary, or anything? I guess it’s been a really, really long time, but I’m just curious how that works.”

Aziraphale stitched his brows together. “I’m sorry. An anniversary?” From behind the angel, Crowley flushed a deep pink. “For what, my dear.”

“For your… for you two…” Anathema stammered. Were they not…?

Crowley shook his head violently over Aziraphale’s shoulder.

The tip of Aziraphale’s nose and ears had gone red, in contrast to his knuckles clutching at his mug, which had gone stark white with tension. “Oh, oh Anathema, we’re not… We’re… no.”

“Oh no. Nevermind! I’m sorry. I just assumed. I shouldn’t have said anything.” She gathered her bag in the uncomfortable extended silence that followed. None of them wanted to make eye contact, to look at one another. Anathema began to walk towards the door of the bookshop, when she paused, and turned to look over her shoulder. “Really? Because it really seems like…”

Aziraphale smiled slightly and looked at the ground, while the demon made a swift and silent slicing motion at his neck, grimacing.

“Right. I’m going to… I better get going.” Foot, meet mouth. Anathema slipped out of the shop and made a quick clip towards the station. She had really stepped in it.

Some time later she flung open the door to Jasmine Cottage to the smell of something wonderful on the stove, with Newt’s tall frame bent over several steaming pots and pans. 

“They’re not together,” she said loudly, taking her bag off and dropping it on the kitchen table. She had steeped in her embarrassment for the entire train ride home and she felt like exploding now.

“Who? And hi, you.” Newt said adoringly over his shoulder, stirring one pot and taking the lid off another. The man couldn’t set up a DVD player, but he could cook.

“Aziraphale and Crowley!” She exclaimed, throwing up her hands, voice exasperated even though Newt had no reasonable way of knowing who she had been talking about.

Newt put down the spoon he had been using, placed the pot lid on the counter and turned to face Anathema head on. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not!” She shrugged off her coat, emboldened now by receiving Newt’s full attention.

“What are they then? Just pals?”

“Yeah. Pals who are hereditary enemies, from the most opposite sides that two people, uh, celestial beings could be on, who tried to thwart the end of the world so they could keep hanging out.” 

“Right, well,” Newt turned back to the stove, turning the flame off and starting to spoon food into two bowls, “How about we have din-”

“And another thing!” She interrupted, pacing around the table, trying to win back her audience of one. “He sleeps there! Crowley. At the bookshop. I think they might live together. They’re clearly in love. Don’t you think?” 

Newt sighed and once again put down his utensils, now used to these enthusiastic outbursts. “I do think. You’re obviously correct. Now, can we have some dinner? Celebrate three months?”

She glared up at him, irrationally annoyed that his kindness was getting in the way of her monologue. Newt bent down to kiss Anathema on the forehead, chortling at her incredulous expression. “Come on then.” He picked up their two bowls, and walked past her into the small dining room.

She turned on her heel to follow him. “Crowley calls Aziraphale ‘angel.’ Did you catch that? I know he is one but you don’t just call someone _angel_!”

It was several weeks before she felt like she could venture back to the shop, antsy with wanting to see more books, and to just get out of Tadfield. She craved mobility. Plus the reading made her feel like she had some sort of project, even if she didn’t. She was not a woman used to living without some sort of goal. 

After a brief phone call with Aziraphale, confirming he’d be in the shop and that it was okay that she join him for an afternoon, she was back on the train, zipping towards the city.

Opening the door of the shop, Anathema was enveloped by the usual warm and musty smell, but there was something else this time. Something just slightly danker. It smelled… private. 

“Oh, hello dear! How lovely to see you!” Aziraphale’s voice, more chipper than she had ever heard it, rang out from the back of the shop, where he was shelving leather bound volumes with gold embossing. He hummed quietly to himself, and smiled.

She spotted Crowley coming down stairs, steaming mug in hand.

Directing her gaze back to the angel, Anathema assessed the situation. “You’re in a good mood,” she said, neutrally.

Crowley sidled up beside Aziraphale, gingerly handed him the mug. The pair looked at one another, smiling with their eyes, the weighty contact lasting longer than Anathema had witnessed previously. She was suddenly struck with the acute feeling that she was intruding.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said gently and in a distracted way, his blue eyes not leaving Crowley’s besotted face. “I suppose you could say we’re celebrating our anniversary.”


	2. Burnt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Chapter Rating:** T  
**Chapter Summary:** The constant reminder that the book had ever existed was the cruelest suggestion that her life was not her own.

She could smell it. Thick smoke lodged deep in her sinuses, so heady it clouded her vision. She breathed it in, coated the very inside of herself with it. Tendrils of black fog wound their way about her heart and squeezed. She wasn’t scared though. She had been here before, in this familiar unfamiliar.

The book was in front of her, suspended in the blackness of space. She reached out. In her attempt to grasp it her fingers went rigid, curved into claws. She batted at it, wanted desperately to open the cover and read the pages inside, to memorize its index. 

Usually there was nothing her useless hands could do to pry it open. But not this time. This time her frozen fingers relented, allowed her to feel with flat palms the faded leather of the spine, the age-softened edges of the paper. She inhaled sharply into smoke black lungs and opened the cover.

The words were there but she recoiled in confusion. She couldn’t read them. It was as if they were in another language, written with a foreign alphabet. There was nothing of this world in them. She frantically turned the page, but it was the same as the first. Page after page of nonsense. It meant nothing to her. Then, at the very back, her name - 

_ Anathema _ -

Before she could read further the book lit up in a heatless flame and crumbled into ash, coating her fingers and forearms, leaving her empty handed. Bereft.

She woke with a start, tangled in sheets. One leg was half off the bed, her bare calf exposed to the cool night air. Newt snored softly beside her. No burning book, no suffocating smoke. Just a small, cottage bedroom. 

That stupid dream.

She sat up and the wrought iron bed frame creaked as her weight shifted. Grimacing, she checked on her companion. The pattern of his breath changed infinitesimally and her movements stopped in response. His eyes played furious patterns below their lids, dancing back and forth. In seconds, his breathing settled back into the steady pace and Anathema exhaled. 

She had woken Newt the first time she had dreamed of the book. When the panic she had felt at being unable to open it had her hysterical in her waking.

“It’s just a dream!” He cried, wrapping his arms around her, pressing her face to his shoulder. She fought the urge to press back, with her hands and in argument.

_ It’s not just a dream, it’s never just a dream with me. Don’t you know what I’m made of? _

Nothing had ever been  _ just _ anything with her. Every minor, menial choice delivered some foretold consequence. It was exhausting. From the time she was a child, from the first moment her mother pressed the  _ Prophecies _ into her tiny hands she had been reduced to a vessel. She was but a mere canvas for an ancient ancestor’s projections.

_ “You are exceptional,” her mother said. _

_ “I don’t want to be exceptional,” twelve-year-old Anathema replied. “I just want to be normal.” _

Normal, of course, was relative. But she had wanted to go to school, make friends, see a movie in a theatre and lie to her parents about staying out late. She wanted to read novels with pretty girls on the cover who went to private schools and had adult-esque scandals, or about vampires who fell in love with girls like her. She wanted to wear jeans.

Anathema rose from the bed, careful not to disturb Newt. She closed the door to the bedroom behind her and went down to the main floor.

It had been that twelve-year-old version of herself whispering into her ear when she had made the choice to burn Agnes’ further prophecies. When she had first seen the manuscript, when she and Newt had opened the trunk she was sunk into a well of dread. Then that little voice said:  _ this doesn’t have to be our life anymore. _

_ Burn it. _

And burn it they had, in the middle of the park (probably illegally, probably needed a fire permit to burn things but she had to get to it before she lost her nerve). The pages had gone bright red at the edges before curling in on themselves in the heat, disintegrating into the pit. Grey flecks blown away in the late summer wind. She watched them float into the distance with trepidation, relief.

Since then there was the dream. Each time she moved a little closer towards the book. Each time she wanted to shake herself awake. She didn’t want the book. She didn’t want to know what lay on its pages, what new predictions her ancestor had laid out for her. The constant reminder that the book had ever existed was the cruelest suggestion that her life was not her own.

She opened the back door of the cottage, the one that led back into the garden. The summer colours had fallen away as autumn had taken hold. It was dark, but the night was clear. A single streetlamp on the road to town cast little light her way.

The cool, damp November air embraced her. Goosebumps rose on her flesh, on her limbs and stomach and neck. She hadn’t bothered with a jacket or a robe. In the stillness of the night, in the flimsy slip of her silk nightgown, she walked out onto the shimmering frost-coated grass, the warmth of her bare soles melting the cold away beneath her feet.

She stepped through the fog that escaped her lips. Stood in the middle of the garden. What was she doing, anyway? Instead of trying to answer the question, she lay down.

She felt the dampness of the ground seep into the gauzy fabric of her nightgown. It was cold but she didn’t feel it, not really. All she could see, sense, was the sky opened up above her. It was different from the sky from where she had grown up and with painful acuity she realized she missed the sound of the ocean. The night here was so quiet, left empty without the distant call of waves crashing against the rocks.

Anathema sighed, and something hard and leaden caught in her throat. 

“Please let my choices belong to me,” she begged in a fervent whisper. Who was she asking Agnes? God? The former spelled her plan out, the latter left Hers unknowable. Neither suited Anathema.

“Let nothing more be fated,” she prayed. “Please, please, please.”

She took a deep breath, and smelled ash and smoke and flame.

**Author's Note:**

> Connect with me on tumblr, [here (personal)](https://bestoftheseekwill.tumblr.com/) or [here (GO dump side-blog)](https://jasmine-cottage-uk.tumblr.com/).


End file.
